The Impossible is Possible Tonight, Tonight

This is the 49th season of Seattle Mariners baseball. Including the one-year Pilots residency, that's 50 seasons of major league baseball in Seattle.

Tonight, for the first time, we get to see our team play a Game Seven.

We're in a weird liminal space waiting for the game to begin; we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know if we play again on Friday. We don't know if this is the end. All day, we're waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting for the death of a season. Waiting for the berth of a World Series team.

Time is never time at all, you can never ever leave, without leaving a piece of youth

I haven't felt this way about baseball since October 1995. The first time they won a division. The first time they won a postseason series. The first go at the World Series. I was 13 years old, an age when it may well be impossible not to find yourself irrevocably in love with baseball magic.

I've never believed otherwise, that even from the depths of despair baseball magic can arise. That nothing's ever over until it's over. But that sort of magic goes both ways and the mid-90s Mariners taught me that no lead is ever large enough when it's under the protection of the Mariners bullpen and no team is ever so good that the playoffs can't destroy it.

I've had a hard time with baseball this season. The real world has blanketed everything with a layer of anxiety and I haven't found baseball to be an escape. Baseball is a dirty, filthy business that's run through with the same fascism we use it to forget for a few hours.

Sports are never going to change the world. We like to tell ourselves that games between rivals can soothe real-life tensions, that a friendly exhibition will put aside our differences. That's never really true. Sports are simply another arena for it all. It's as real life as anything else.

But baseball still has magic there, between the layers of dirty laundry, underneath the filth of billionaire owners and right-wing players. There is magic.

Believe, that life can change, that you're not stuck in vain

If the Mariners win today, they will play again on Friday. Friday just so happens to be the 30th anniversary of the other wildly significant thing that happened to me in October 1995: The Smashing Pumpkins released Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

If I was primed at the age of 13 to become completely and totally obsessed with a baseball team, the same was certainly true of music. That album became the soundtrack of my high school experience. The lyrics were the filler in the notes I'd write my friends and the doodles in the margins of my math notes.

I never saw the Smashing Pumpkins live until last September when they were an opener for Green Day (another band from my teenage years that I still desperately love). After all these years, Billy Corgan was screeching into the microphone, moving around the stage in the long black coat and combat boots that were a look from the 90s. Maybe it all should have been cringe, as the kids say now, a man in his late 50s singing the songs he wrote in his 20s, but for a little while I was living my teenage dream.

And that's how the end of this baseball season has felt. The disinterest I had earlier in the year has fallen away. I've embraced this team, despite baseball's filthiness. I've embraced it as a temporary escape. I've embraced feeling like I'm 13 all over again, when anything was possible.

And you know you're never sure, but you're sure you could be right, if you held yourself up to the light

I've often worn my Mariners fandom as an identity, and alternatively, as a shield to explain my cynicism. But underneath, as losing seasons built upon losing seasons, as I watch my country burn, I still believe there is magic there.

None of the magic is tied up in winning. Maybe it's being a Mariners fan that has convinced me there is something rotten about having a single-minded focus on winning, that the value of something isn't necessarily in the result. Maybe it's watching, over my entire lifetime, the men who run the world fixate so hard on winning and bringing their entitled dreams to life, to reach the place we are now, an openly fascist country where people are kidnapped off the streets and from their homes, where cities are terrorized by the military we were indoctrinated to believe existed to preserve our freedom.

Nothing the Mariners do will change anything that's happening. But maybe they can help us remember that hope and belief are powerful. They are magic.

And the embers never fade, in your city by the lake, the place were you were born

It's almost impossible that the Mariners are here in the first place. They won the division because the Astros were decimated with injuries. They won a first-round bye because the Tigers absolutely collapsed. I tend to think the playoffs lean toward a tossup; a five or seven-game series can never replicate what is won over an entire season.

Tonight, I want to feel it all the way I did when I was 13. I want to lose myself in the magic of baseball. I want to party like it's October 1995, when I believed in baseball and immersed myself in a way I've never been able to do again.

I want to embrace this liminal space that will exist until the final out is recorded, and an American League Pennant winner is crowned. This space where we will cheer and rejoice, where we will despair, where we will feel as though all is lost. Where we will find, at the end, that the magic was there all along.

Believe, in the resolute urgency of now, and if you believe there's not a chance tonight...

I almost don't want to write the words or say them out loud, the way we tip-toe around no-hitters as if we hold the power to jinx them. But here we are, Game Seven, staring at it. The World Series.

A sports team was never going to change the world. But it took 50 years to get here. If we ever need a reminder that things can change, the Mariners are it. They've been achingly bad, depressingly bad. They've never had the support they deserved from their ownership. There's a lot of dirty and filth around them.

But we are here now, the result of luck and pluck, thanks to the bounce of a ball here and a carom there. It's not about winning. It never was. This is about believing.

I think about the game tonight as I sit here, waiting, waiting, waiting. I hear the swell of the orchestra in "Tonight, Tonight", my favorite song from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I may just be a sucker for orchestral strings in a rock song, but this was always a song I felt deeply.

It echoes in my head, thinking about the game, thinking about the real world.

Game Seven. Anything can happen.

We'll crucify the insincere
Tonight, tonight
We'll make things right, we'll feel it all
Tonight, tonight
We'll find a way to offer up the night
Tonight, tonight
The indescribable moments of your life
Tonight, tonight

Believe in me as I believe in you
Tonight, tonight